The Republican National Committee issued a clarification Sunday after a tweet posted to its official account credited Rosa Parks for “her role in ending racism.”
The message was intended to commemorate the 58th anniversary of Parks’s arrest, when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man. But the statement drew immediate fire, with critics blasting Republicans for suggesting racism was over.
The flap briefly led to a #RacismEndedWhen hashtag on Twitter, which some — including DNC vice chairwoman Donna Brazile — seized on to poke the RNC.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also seized on the hashtag to catalog instances of Republican missteps on racial issues.
Within hours, the RNC issued a clarification of their tweet, stressing that they meant to note the role of the historic protest in the fight to end racism.